Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

The church says Earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence in a shadow than the church.

If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Things can be tricky even when they don't look it

At SLON.ru, Oleg Kashin has an article called Почему Россия проиграла войну на Украине, or Why Russia has lost the war in Ukraine.*

The article itself is fascinating, but I'm just interested here in one little phrase: не чета. Чета is couple or pair, often referring to a married couple. Не чета in the negative means 'not a pair'; not a match is how it's usually translated. But there's a problem with that ... See how he uses it, talking about Putin's calling the dissolution of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century":

Maybe Putin had in the various regional wars which came along with the fall of the Soviet Union - Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Tajikistan, Abkhazia? Wars are bad, but the twentieth century had many others, much bloodier; that is, in this situation you simply can't call the dissolution of the Soviet Union the worst. Nor has anyone ever been tempted to calls Yugoslavia's collapse a geopolitical disaster, though the fighting there was no match even for Nagorno-Karabakh.

That seems a bit odd in English, doesn't it? A isn't a disaster, nor is B even though it's not as bad as A.

The problem is that although literally не чета means "not a match", Russian and English approach that concept from different angles. In English, "you're no match for him" means "he's better than you" (or, if what you're measuring is the bloodiness of wars, "Yugoslavia's no match even for Karabakh" means "Yugoslavia's less bloody even than Karabakh"). But in Russian, it means "you're better than he is" (or, "Yugoslavia's bloodier even than Karabakh").

You look at a Russian-English dictionary (such as Multitran and you get "no match". That is right in one way and yet totally wrong where it counts - in what it actually means. But if you go to Russian-Russian sources and get a definition, you'll get Не чета кто-что кому-чему (разг.) - не ровня,лучше кого-чего-н. в каком-н. отношении. Ne cheta kto-chto komu-chemu, someone-something is no match for someone-something (colloquial) - not equalling, better than someone-something in some quality. The Russian dictionary tells you what the translation means - and in this case, tells you (if you are a native speaker of English, any way) that the translation is wrong.

I tell my students to use Ozhegov or some other Russian defining dictionary rather than relying on translating dictionaries, or at least to go to Ozhegov when something seems a bit hinky in your translation.

The political and military defeat of Russia in Ukraine (and the demand put on the record in Minks for "the special status of specific regions" is a defeat already) is just the consequence of the defeat in meaning and values which took place back in last spring. A state begins not with an army and not with institutions but with an idea, with words. "We came to Donetsk in order to..." - and the rest is silence, there is simply nothing further to say and they are forced to carry on with their drivel about a junta and Banderist fascists - drivel that is, by the way, heard less and less now if it's heard at all.

This year has shown that it is Russia's fate to relive forever the Soviet victory in 1945 and rejoice over Kadyrov's peace in Chechya; any other idea will tear down the Russian Federation. And that is why the war for Novorossiya quickly turned into a war for nothing, and a war which is waged for nothing simply cannot be won - especially if the enemy is fighting for their homeland. The time has come to rewrite the drafts of future presidential Messages*. The worst geopolitical disaster** was not the dissolution of the Soviet Union, let that go. The year of the Ukrainian war has shown that Russia itself is now the worst geopolitical disaster, and one that is always with us.

* Russia equivalent of the State of the Union address
** An allusion to Putin's statement in Minsk that "for the EU, the time has come to rewrite the history of Crimea before someone else does it for you"

1 Comments:

Likewise, I sometimes get my best help from a Portuguese-Portuguese dictionary. Occasionally I then need to cheat by copying/pasting the definitions into Google Translate, but shhhh, don't tell anyone ;-)

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About Me

I used to teach Russian and Ukrainian, and some basic English, to civil servants. Now I teach Russian at a local continued-learning institute. I dabble in Gaelic and Welsh. I'm am amateur photographer and I love birding (in a small way). I'm a Progressive, and a Freethinker, and I know Evolution is a fact - that's FCD, Friend of Charles Darwin (look down the sidebar). I read a lot, and follow women's college basketball. Also I love astronomy, though I'm a rank amateur at it. Most of all, I like living in the reality-based community...

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You cannot leave. You cannot drop the armor now. Why? Because you are needed, more than ever. You are mandatory to keep the energy flowing, the karmic vibrator buzzing, to keep the progressive and lucid half of the nation breathing and healthy and awake and ever reaching out to the half that's wallowing in fear and violence and homophobia and sexual dread, hoping to find harmony instead of cacophony, common ground instead of civil war, some sort of a shared love of a country so messy and internationally disrespected and openly confused its own president can't even speak the language.

After all, you don't hand over all your children the first time the flying monkeys bang on your door...

It's far from over. The tunnel is just a little darker -- and longer -- than we imagined.
Mark Morford